 | |
| Developer(s) | Wolfram Research |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 10.0.1 |
| Operating system | Cross-platform (list) |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Parallel computation |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www |
gridMathematica is a software product sold by Wolfram Research which extends the parallel processing capabilities of its main product Mathematica. [1]
gridMathematica increases the number of parallel processes that Mathematica can run at once. Each parallel process applies an additional CPU to a task. A standard Mathematica license allows up to four parallel tasks to run at once. By increasing the number of tasks available, some types of problems can be solved faster. [2]
Standard Mathematica consists of a front end which provides a user interface and a controlling process (the control kernel) which has computational tasks performed by up to four processes. Mathematica calls the processes performing computations "compute kernels." gridMathematica allows additional kernels to be used.
The "gridMathematica Local" license allows the use of up to 8 compute kernels on a single computer. The "gridMathematica Server" license allows for the use of up to 16 compute kernels distributed across multiple computers.
Mathematica manages the interprocess communication such as queueing, virtual shared memory, and failure recovery. [3]
gridMathematica scales to larger grid systems when additional licenses are purchased. Compute processes can be located on a single multiprocessor computer or distributed over a remote heterogeneous network. [4] [5] 64 bit platforms are supported. [6] The communication between the kernels and the front end uses the Mathlink interface, which is an interface designed to allow external programs to communicate with Mathematica. The communication is over TCP/IP [7] and use SSH or RSH for authentication.
Before the release of Mathematica 7, gridMathematica and the now-discontinued Mathematica Personal Grid Edition were the only versions of Mathematica to provide parallel computation. They worked as stand-alone products including Front End and Control Kernels and the Parallel Computing Toolkit developed by Roman Maeder, one of the original authors of Mathematica. With the release of Mathematica 7, the parallel programming tools were redesigned and included in Mathematica, [8] and gridMathematica was redesigned to work directly with Mathematica. [9]
In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by a scheduler, which is typically a part of the operating system. In many cases, a thread is a component of a process.
An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including electrical or electronic hardware and mechanical parts. Because an embedded system typically controls physical operations of the machine that it is embedded within, it often has real-time computing constraints. Embedded systems control many devices in common use. In 2009, it was estimated that ninety-eight percent of all microprocessors manufactured were used in embedded systems.
Wolfram Mathematica is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allow machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network analysis, time series analysis, NLP, optimization, plotting functions and various types of data, implementation of algorithms, creation of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other programming languages. It was conceived by Stephen Wolfram, and is developed by Wolfram Research of Champaign, Illinois. The Wolfram Language is the programming language used in Mathematica. Mathematica 1.0 was released on June 23, 1988 in Champaign, Illinois and Santa Clara, California.
A computer algebra system (CAS) or symbolic algebra system (SAS) is any mathematical software with the ability to manipulate mathematical expressions in a way similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. The development of the computer algebra systems in the second half of the 20th century is part of the discipline of "computer algebra" or "symbolic computation", which has spurred work in algorithms over mathematical objects such as polynomials.
A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them. The result is a high-performance parallel computing cluster from inexpensive personal computer hardware.
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has long been employed in high-performance computing, but has gained broader interest due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling. As power consumption by computers has become a concern in recent years, parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors.
Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is a software tool for parallel networking of computers. It is designed to allow a network of heterogeneous Unix and/or Windows machines to be used as a single distributed parallel processor. Thus large computational problems can be solved more cost effectively by using the aggregate power and memory of many computers. The software is very portable; the source code, available free through netlib, has been compiled on everything from laptops to Crays.
Wolfram Research, Inc. is an American multinational company that creates computational technology. Wolfram's flagship product is the technical computing program Wolfram Mathematica, first released on June 23, 1988. Other products include WolframAlpha, Wolfram SystemModeler, Wolfram Workbench, gridMathematica, Wolfram Finance Platform, webMathematica, the Wolfram Cloud, and the Wolfram Programming Lab. Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram is the CEO. The company is headquartered in Champaign, Illinois, United States.
General-purpose computing on graphics processing units is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the central processing unit (CPU). The use of multiple video cards in one computer, or large numbers of graphics chips, further parallelizes the already parallel nature of graphics processing.
HTCondor is an open-source high-throughput computing software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks. It can be used to manage workload on a dedicated cluster of computers, or to farm out work to idle desktop computers – so-called cycle scavenging. HTCondor runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. HTCondor can integrate both dedicated resources and non-dedicated desktop machines into one computing environment.
IPython is a command shell for interactive computing in multiple programming languages, originally developed for the Python programming language, that offers introspection, rich media, shell syntax, tab completion, and history. IPython provides the following features:
The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an organized, open-source collection of small interactive programmes called Demonstrations, which are meant to visually and interactively represent ideas from a range of fields. It is hosted by Wolfram Research, whose stated goal is to bring computational exploration to a large population. At its launch, it contained 1300 demonstrations but has grown to over 10,000. The site won a Parents' Choice Award in 2008.
Xgrid is a proprietary grid computing program and protocol developed by the Advanced Computation Group subdivision of Apple Inc.
A computer cluster is a set of computers that work together so that they can be viewed as a single system. Unlike grid computers, computer clusters have each node set to perform the same task, controlled and scheduled by software. The newest manifestation of cluster computing is cloud computing.
The kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system and generally has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts between different processes. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components. A full kernel controls all hardware resources via device drivers, arbitrates conflicts between processes concerning such resources, and optimizes the utilization of common resources e.g. CPU & cache usage, file systems, and network sockets. On most systems, the kernel is one of the first programs loaded on startup. It handles the rest of startup as well as memory, peripherals, and input/output (I/O) requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit.
Data-intensive computing is a class of parallel computing applications which use a data parallel approach to process large volumes of data typically terabytes or petabytes in size and typically referred to as big data. Computing applications that devote most of their execution time to computational requirements are deemed compute-intensive, whereas applications are deemed data-intensive require large volumes of data and devote most of their processing time to I/O and manipulation of data.
Message passing is an inherent element of all computer clusters. All computer clusters, ranging from homemade Beowulfs to some of the fastest supercomputers in the world, rely on message passing to coordinate the activities of the many nodes they encompass. Message passing in computer clusters built with commodity servers and switches is used by virtually every internet service.
A notebook interface or computational notebook is a virtual notebook environment used for literate programming, a method of writing computer programs. Some notebooks are WYSIWYG environments including executable calculations embedded in formatted documents; others separate calculations and text into separate sections. Notebooks share some goals and features with spreadsheets and word processors but go beyond their limited data models.